Elegant software

I hope to find some time to write about elegant software. By elegant software I actually mean elegant code. It's something that most of us recognize immediately, like a beautiful building or painting or even a car. But like in art, tastes differ and it's also hard to describe what exactly is elegant. Is it the symmetry of a building, the colors used in a painting, etc. Somehow when you look at it, it feels right. This will just be my random exploration on this subject. Questions that I find interesting are "Is it possible to quantify elegancy?", "Can another program improve the elegancy of a given piece of code?", "What factors are important for defining elegancy?", "Is code elegancy just about software metrics?", "Does an elegant desing imply elegant code and vica versa?", etc.

There are also certain aspects I wish to exclude. I'm not interested in time to market, available resources and lots of other factors that have an impact on code quality/elegancy.